Beneath the much-loved ‘rainbow nation’ lurks a plethora of multifaceted challenges and simmering tensions. As one of the countries still grappling with issues of diversity, South Africa faces the challenge of lacking a unique and indigenous approach to diversity and its management. We need a customised approach to diversity, as dictated by local realities and conditions on the ground, writes Stanley Letsoko.

by Stanley Letsoko

Research indicates that countries, organisations and companies with a customised approach to diversity and its management tend to enjoy more success than those that have copied it wholesale from elsewhere, especially those that have copied everything from countries such as the United States (US). In South Africa (SA), the main challenge – that we lack a unique and indigenous approach to diversity − has led to a multiplicity of other, serious sub-challenges currently at the heart of our country’s identity crisis. The issue of identity crisis is compounded, not only by SA’s lack of a corpus linguistic, but also by its own discourse on diversity. These problems have in turn resulted in a climate of confusion, apathy and lack of clear direction. Our attempt to compensate for what we don’t have so far has resulted in us not only adopting the hegemony of the Americans’ corpus linguistic, but also the American discourses on diversity.

The American diversity discourse not only informs diversity discourse in South Africa, but also dictates the pace and the way forward for most South African organisations. While this may seem legitimate on the surface – after all, SA is a young democracy, and young democracies should learn from countries that have been there before – it poses a serious threat to the well-being of our democracy. The danger of SA depending on the US to deal with its own challenges around diversity does not only lie in SA’s lack of a clear direction, but also with SA going through the same routines that the US has had to go through in relation to diversity and its management. By so doing we are actually solving America’s past problems, not necessarily SA’s current ones, as they exist on the ground.

According to scholars, diversity and its management in the US were not the primary focus until the 1990s. The rise of diversity as a focus was a purely fortuitous development that arose as a result of campaigns against affirmative action (AA) and employment equity opportunity (EEO) (Litvin, 2006). Two movements tend to be credited for the shift from AA and EEO in the US to diversity management, or simply affirming diversity: one led by captains of industry such as Lew Platt, who was former CEO of Hewlett Packard (Kochan et al 2003), and another movement by consultants, led by the likes of Roosevelt R. Thomas Jr. (Litvin, 2006).